CARLO GOLDONI had some advice for any writer wanting to translate his Italian comedy A Servant With Two Masters: Do it, but give it local life and the native tongue, warmth and comic vitality and be free with the text.

Blake Morrison has taken him at his word, and so the grand canal of Venice is replaced by the reet grand Leeds-Liverpool canal at Skipton in a gloriously rumbustious new translation far more humorous and saucier than the sophisticated metropolitan original (although the couple of overly-industrial f' words should be shown the door).

Local rivalries abound, much like in pantomime. Against a backdrop of the railways threatening the supremacy of the canals and the Skipton economy being run on farming and mining and stone extraction - hence the coal and stone heaps of Leslie Travers' design - the crafty meddlesome figure of Arthur Dodge (Barrie Rutter) arrives from Muker (Swaledale).

It is a Yorkshire world divided into rough clogs and polished leather, and artful Arthur will dodge between the two, serving his two masters, but above all himself with his eye for housekeeper Esme Dean (Nicola Sanderson) and sherry trifle.

Dales farmer Samuel Towler (Dicken Ashworth, Yorkshire's answer to Les Dawson with his bellicose hang-dog putdowns) wants to marry off his daughter Clarice (Victoria Fleming) to wealthy businessman Charles Ramsay. That's bad news for her true love, Stephen (Matt Connor), the headstrong son of Reverend Lumb (Roy North), a vicar with an amusing penchant for Latin versions of biblical bon mots and Yorkshire homilies.

Charles, however, is dead, but his sister Charlotte (Kate Ambler) is masquerading as him, taking on Dodge to assist him/her (a confusion that led to a Rutter slip-up that he milked wonderfully). Dodge, or Cheetham as he calls himself too, is also in the pay of Charlotte's lover, Frank Flowers (irascible Simon Holland Roberts), who thinks he has killed Charles.

This is but the bare bones of an over-the-top yet still believable comedy played to the heights by one and all and written by Morrison with more similes than a Lionel Blue thought for the day.

Morrison has made comic joy from the natural resources of northern lingo, plundering W Carr's The Dialect Of Craven for a fusillade of West Riding insults and expressions that make Emmerdale look so tame - and if the world can laugh at Monty Python's Four Yorkshiremen sketch, then Broadsides' self-mockery of Yorkshire characteristics - "in't in inn" and all - should attain popularity beyond the Ridings.

Dodge is pure golden butter for the wide-eyed Rutter, but under his direction the comedy is spread thickly, never more so than in the swinging-door farce of frantic meal. A five-course comic feast indeed.

The Man With Two Gaffers, Northern Broadsides, York Theatre Royal, until September 16; Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, November 20 to 25. Box office: York, 01904 623568; Scarborough, 01723 370541.